Women Erased: The Latinx Future of the Church with Natalia Imperatori-Lee, Ph.D.

Professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee explores how dominant narratives about Catholicism in the United States often render the stories of its significant and growing Latinx membership, especially that of Latina women invisible or irrelevant. Few U.S. Catholics understand that Latinx/Hispanic Catholics encompass both the oldest Catholic inhabitants of this land and its newest arrivals. Through the literary and artist works of Latina women like Rosario Ferré and Yolanda López, as well as the popular faith practices such as the devotion to Guadalupe, Imperatori-Lee illustrates how the sensus fidelium subverts institutional notions of holiness and offers a more truthful, complicated, but wholistic understanding of the intuitions and holiness of the laity, in general, and women in particular.

Natalia Imperatori-Lee is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in the Bronx, NY, where she also coordinates the Catholic Studies program. She is the author of Cuéntame: Narrative in the Ecclesial Present (Orbis Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in Theological Studies and The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. A Cuban-American native of Miami, Florida, Imperatori-Lee has served on the Board of Directors of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the US. She lives in the Bronx with her spouse and two sons.